The best musical artists develop at an early age. Having a very innate need to communicate at the most basic level, a young mind has yet to be distracted by a significant dependence on other means of communication. As the young artist grows, the acquisition of technical skills must be kept in congruence with an increasing musical development. Among the many tasks at hand, the young musician must learn to correlate their chosen instrument with traditional musical notation. Considering the complexity of traditional musical notation, this can be problematic and often results in the loss of a potential future musician.
This issue is the subject of many patents including U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,416,182, 5,183,398, 6,204,441, 6,388,181, 6,066,791, 5,540,132, 6,337,433, and 6,284,961. However, these cases as well as others like them, require specialized equipment and/or extraneous devices such as color coded tags affixed to the instrument. Many require a computer display or color-coded sheet music. Indeed, some propose that the traditional method of printing sheet music be abandoned altogether in favor of other methods of musical notation that, although meritous in some ways, often trade the inherent and necessary complexity of traditional sheet music with trinkets and hardware that eventually prove to be even more burdensome.